All DJ Entries

(Good -- um... afternoon, everybody. On the weekdays, I usually write my dreams in the morning, on my subway ride in to work. But this morning I didn't think I remembered any dreams.

Then, sitting at work (really stressing over something, in fact), I suddenly recalled this dream. Weird.

The dream is weird. I'd say at least part of the influence on it is the fact that over the past couple days I've been reading Jack Kerouac's Book of Dreams. In one dream, Kerouac meets Dinah Shore. That dream was so charming, I think I also wanted to have a dream where I met a celebrity. So my unconscious obliged... kinda.)

Susan Faludi was out in the desert doing research on a new book she was writing. The book was similar to The Terror Dream. But this book had less to do with feminism and more to do with some general national conspiracy. I probably identified with Faludi or saw through her eyes.

Faludi had discovered whatever it was she had been trying to discover. She may now have been standing by her car in an empty road in the middle of the desert. Faludi may have slammed down the trunk or hatchback of her car with an air of finality.

She intended to go somewhere. Instead of taking her car, which now may not even have existed, she flew up into the air, possibly by means of a red and white striped parachute.

She flew away to her right, along the road. She knew that she actually needed to head along the road, but in the opposite direction. She flew over a small overpass. This overpass was a landmark telling her she was definitely going in the wrong direction.

The wind was carrying her in this direction, although she "had control" over "her power of flight." She kept telling herself that she would work up the momentum of the wind in order to get swinging around in the correct direction.

But she kept flying and flying in the wrong direction. It was now night. Faludi was in the woods. It was cold and snowing. Still flying along the highway, I/Faludi (I definitely was part of her decision making process here) saw a billboard. The billboard was on a 50-foot tall, steel column.

I knew that if I/she grabbed on to the guard rail in front of the walkway before the billboard, I/she could stop the uncontrolled flight and at least get my/her bearings. So Faludi grabbed the railing and did some kind of elastic flip onto the walkway before the billboard.

The walkway was snowy and lit by a few fluorescent flood lamps. Othewise, everything was snowy, cotton-grey dark. Some pine trees may have reached as high as the billboard.

Faludi huddled behind some weird, clear, plastic rectangle which I figured was some kind of a solar panel for powering the billboard's lights. Faludi thought she could call someone, perhaps her husband, to pick her up here. But it was just so cold, and she felt like it would take forever for someone to get here.

I had a false awakening. I was going about my "daily life" when somebody, possibly my mother, told me that Susan Faludi had died. I was really surprised and upset. I regretted the fact that I'd never gotten to meet her.

But it also seemed weird that Faludi should have died. She had always seemed like such a healthy person to me.

Somehow I saw a photo of her -- possibly on the web. The photo showed Faludi in a motorized wheelchair, like they have at the front of grocery stores, the kind that look almost like cars or scooters with baskets on the front. Faludi was overweight, with short, grey hair. She wore a white t-shirt and black slacks, both of which were sloppy and tight on her.

Again, this didn't make sense. I thought, There's no way Faludi could have changed this quickky. I began to doubt seriously whether Faludi was in fact dead.

(Just one small note on this, from November 14th. After looking at some news images, I realize that the image Susan Faludi is hiding behind in the snow is a teleprompter. I'm not sure why a teleprompter is hanging out on a billboard. And I'm not sure why I thought it was a solar panel.

But, then again, I'm still not sure why this dream involved Susan Faludi. The actions in this dream are completely the opposite of what I feel Falud's actions would be. They're more like what I think my own actions would be. So maybe the dream is saying I wish I was like Susan Faludi, but that I'm just still horribly, embarrassingly like myself. Oh, well.)

Good morning everybody. I remember two dreams from last night. I wrote them down late, so my day memory might be clouding them up a little.

Two side notes: the bowling alley in the first dream comes from an msn.com photo article I read about huge mansions. Almost every mansion had a movie theatre and a bowling alley.

Also, the cops coming to my house is from my waking life. My upstairs neighbors always slam and slam on the floor. I feel like it's done to hurt me, like they don't want me around. It's been going on for a long time. I've finally called the police, because it's gotten so constant, loud, and violent that I'm afraid to come home. I feel terrible for calling, because I've never wanted to be the kind of person who calls the police on people. But I also have a fear of the police.

Dream #1

I was in a car with my old friends D and Y, riding through the parking lot of a bowling alley. It was probably night time. D was probably driving the car.

We let Y out, probably to run in and get a lane. For some reason, the car now seemed to be gone. D and I were walking away from the bowling alley, as if we had finished the game and were walking to the car.

I really wasn't happy to have to hang around with D, and I think I was making that known to him. At some point it became dark, like at night. D was wearing a shiny, black leather jacket. I asked him how his life was. He broke down and started crying about how his mother had died.

It was daytime again. I felt really bad for D, and I tried to comfort him. He kind of brushed me off and told me it was fine. Apparently his mother had had a terminal disease which acted very quickly on her. D told me something his mother had told him before she died, which made him feel better about the whole thing. It made me think of toothpaste for some reason.

We had been wandering through the first few rows of the parking lot, more like we were waiting for Y to arrive with the car again, although it was also like we were trying to find the car. But now we were walking back toward the bowling alley.

The parking lot had been asphalt. But now it was dirt. The dust was floating up into the blue sky, as if there were a lot of traffic or wind in the parking lot, even though I couldn't see any activity.

Some old friends of ours came up to me and D. They started saying a lot of teasing things to D. But I got really angry and threatening with them, telling them to leave D alone, he'd had to deal with enough already. Everybody said sorry and left D alone.

We were all walking back toward the bowling alley. We were close to the building, but the actual entrance now felt so far away. I somehow got separated from the rest of the group. I walked all by myself, in a stretch of dirt road between the building-front's sidewalk and a long strip of concrete island.

The ruts in the ground looked like horse carriages ran through it. I thought to myself, Of course they do. That's how things worked in the Old West. And that's where I am.

I wondered where the heck the car was. I couldn't remember if I was going into the bowling alley or going home. But if I was going home, I wanted to get in the car and go. And if I was going into the bowling alley, I wanted to take the car to get there quicker.

But I thought to myself, No car is ever going to come pick you up, dummy. This is the Old West. We didn't have cars back then.

Dream #2

I had called the police because the people upstairs from me were slamming and slamming on the floor again. It was morning, and the light in my bedroom was grey and slightly dim. The police knocked on my door.

I opened the door. There was just one officer: a short, slightly overweight, black woman in her late 40s or early 50s. She told me that I had called the police so many times that I was now under investigation myself. She would have to search my house.

I said fine. I let her in. I just let her go wherever she wanted in my house. I went back to my bed and lay down. I figured that I wouldn't follow the officer around. That would look suspicious, like I had something to hide, which I didn't.

But I slowly realized that my apartment was actually very large (which it is definitely not in waking life). I realized I had a lot of rooms, and that as soon as the officer saw how many rooms I had, she'd get jealous of me and try to find some reason to arrest me.

So I started running through the house, trying to find the officer. I figured that I'd explain how much room I had in this house by telling the officer that my mother also lived here with me.

I was actually surprised by how many rooms I had in the house. I hadn't realized this place was so big. But a lot of the rooms were done up in such a hyper-girly way, with pink and purple colors, stuffed animals, and fluffy, lacy bed covers, that I felt like someone other than I had to have been living here. I gradually became convinced that my mother was in fact living here with me.

Now, confident that my story was the truth, I felt like I could confront the officer with my story, preventing her from getting jealous and throwing me in jail for some made up reason.

I found the officer in a hyper-girly room, sitting on the bed. She started talking to me about something, but I can't remember what. All I remember is that she seemed to be very sad.

So when I first remember starting in my dream I'm sitting with part of my family and a couple of my friends, only one of whom I can actually recognize. We're in what seems like a very large cafeteria area that is open to the sky above us. Suddenly, lots of food appears on the table in front of us, but I'm not sure what all of it is, but I eat nonetheless. While we eat, performers come and go to what seems like a stage at the front of the cafeteria-area. Depending on what they do, their props seem to magically appear onto the stage. I'm amazed by it all and laugh along with my friends about all the tricks we're getting to see.

Near the end of the show, the only one of my friends that I recognize decides she wants dessert. It's no big deal to me at first. I quickly become agitated as she begins randomly yelling out to waiters to bring her something. My frustration with my friend increases when she begins trying to claim other people's desserts because no one will bring her one. Angry at her behavior, I leave the table to go outside and wait for everyone else to finish. It doesn't seem to take them long before my friends come out first and begin walking in one direction, and then my family come out and walk in another. Not sure which to follow, I begin tagging along with my parents only to find out that wasn't the way we needed to go. They just wanted to go to the car first before we walked home. I feel like something is up at this point, because it itched at my mind to ask them, "Why don't we just drive the car home, then?" However, I don't ask the question, they get what they need, and we begin what my mom tells me is a 25 miles trek in one direction.

Suddenly my dream shifts to a completely different scene from the one we were previously at. This time I don't seem to be myself, but rather a sort of 3rd-person view over the situation. This guy seems to be a sort of victim and is being escorted to a seating area by two other men. The guy, who we'll call Victim, looks relatively all right other than it looking like he has a sort of broken nose. When Victim enters the clearing with the two men, a rather large woman is already sitting in a chair. Before Victim even has a chance to sit down, she gets up and apologizes constantly about having punched him in the face. She claims she got excited in the moment and meant nothing towards him. Before anything else can be said, I wake up from the sound of my alarm clock going off.

I'm in a classroom that kind of looks like it's in a high school, having a conversation about my teacher with the teacher in that classroom (I'm from another class). She says, “His name is Guy, right?” [It is, in real life, but I'm not in high school anymore.]

My mom and I are driving on a dirt road through a big park on a cloudy day. [We're actually sitting in the front of the car this time.] The park has lots of big, dark-green trees in it, and several playground areas. It is located somewhere in the Santa Barbara area. At one point, the dirt road goes right through the center of one of the playground areas, so there's blue and orange play equipment on either side of the road. We stop here, and my mom asks me, “Did you know that this was where your dad and I met?” I say no, and then she tells me the story of how they met.

FA in which I discover that my bed has shifted around until it's sticking out from the wall between the desk and the sewing cabinet. I wonder how on earth I managed to move around so much in the night that my bed moved that far.

Good morning everybody. I remember two dreams from last night. But my memory of both is a little fuzzy. I took some NyQuil last night because I have a cold.

Dream #1

I had just gotten off a plane. I got into an old, baby blue VW Beetle, which was in something like an underground parking lot. I'm not sure exactly what I did in the Beetle, because I didn't move the car.

I walked up into some kind of terminal corridor at the airport. There were very few people around. The place looked old and dim. I walked though this terminal and into another parking garage.

I was walking through this parking garage as if I were just going to walk straight out of the airport. But then I remembered that I had a car in this parking garage, and that I needed to drive it home. It was actually my mom's car. It was a Cadillac, like from the 1970s.

I turned around and walked back in the direction I had come from. I may have been able to see back into the terminal, which may now have looked like a big, empty living room with a big concession stand in it.

I found the Cadillac parked so it faced a concrete wall. I got in and began to pull it out of the parking space. I figured this would be a fine car to drive back to my mom's house.

But then I remembered that I already had my mom's other car, the VW Beetle, parked in the parking garage on the other side of the airport and way underground.

I stopped the Cadillac, trying to figure which car I should drive back to my mom's house. I hated the Beetle. But it was my mom's car, and I would have to bring it back to her. I couldn't figure out how I could get both cars home. I also couldn't figure out how I'd gotten both cars here in the first place.

I pulled the car back into the parking space. Something about that action felt so good that I did it again and again. I couldn't quite get the car between the lines of the parking space.

I began imagining myself as a businessman from the 1970s: a tall, white, handsome man with blue eyes, a silly kind of permed hair-do, and a full but well-trimmed beard. The man's hair was brown but greying a little. The man wore a very slim grey suit with a pale blue shirt.

Dream #2

A man and woman in their 40s or 50s were trying to escape from some group of people. The man and woman ended up in a room in a building like a mansion. In this room, you would perform some kind of ritual and it would do something like make you immortal.

The man had gotten the woman to undergo this ritual before the people had come. The view had been from outside the room, so I couldn't see what had happened inside the room.

Now it was like everything had started all over again. The man and the woman went to a few different places. Then they ended up being pursued by people who didn't want them to do the ritual.

The man and woman were on the run. They were back at the mansion. They stood inside a dim, wood-walled room. They were trying to unlock and open a huge, heavy wood door. There was a feeling of urgency, as if the people pursuing the man and woman could be here at any moment. The lights in the room were flickering on and off, as if it were thundering inside.

Finally the man and woman got the door open. Beyond the door there was a lot of flashing. I was really curious what this whole thing was about, and I didn't want this "movie view" from outside the room. I really wanted to see what happened in the room.

I now identified with the man. I was him. I stood in the room. The room was wide and square, and it was almost entirely taken up by a strange pool. The pool seemed to be filled with clouds rather than liquid. The clouds may also have been flashing, as if with lightning. I now understood that this pool was some kind of portal to another dimension.

The man and woman knew the people were coming. So they had to jump in the pool. The man/I decided to go first this time. I jumped out really far and did some kind of twirling diver move.

I began descending through the clouds. There was white light and a calm, but almost electric, feeling all around me.

Dinosaurs Must Die

AT was at some day camp. I think I was a counselor or something. The building's insides were a friendly white with a pale blue rim and there were kids running around everywhere. I went to a room with 2 of my friends, peter and another. This room looked a lot like my old room and the lights were off. We were joking about knives and while they were taking there's out to brag about I just felt that mine was in my back pocket. The lights were off but there were tons of ambient light. I turned around and saw a shadow of someone holding a formidable blade coming from the bathroom door. I laughed uncomfortably. I halfway try to get the others to shut up but they keep talking. Out of the bathroom busts a veloceraptor my height and rushes towards Peter. The other friend is no one where to be seen. The raptor bites peter and he started to cry. It looks at me and rushes. After taking out my knife, trying to stab in in the face, and my knife falling from my grip, I catch its head in my hands and its jaws, annoying close to my face, snap wildly. I, push back, diving to the floor and taking it with me. I then couldn't think of what to do so I started bashing its head against the tile of the bathroom. I kept doing so until I felt its brain start to leak out of the back side of his skull. Finally, I stopped, put the head down and watched. After only 5 seconds or so, the still body reanimated it self with fierceness. I ran out of the bathroom, and while closing the door, caught its head within the door and the doorframe. I pull hard, watching it writhe, until its head popped off and fell to the floor. With that I ran out of the room.

Next I can remember, I went out of the building, found a red sports car and started driving fast. I was in a heavily wooded area with an established highway with enough traffic, I had to weave. Soon from the forest a giant t-rex came out and started chasing me in the car. I arrive at a building and run in. It's a giant court room. When I say giant, I mean that instead of pews or seats for people to watch, there's a balcony of unimaginable space. Everything was elevated seriously high and everything had stairs that lead up to it. It went so high that when I made it up the stairs to the lowest thing, the judges chair and defendant seat, I was just to the top of the T-Rex that just busted in. There were others in here with me, all just as scared. The first target was a blonde, it snapped her up easily. Next it went for me, but when I dodged it it just got whoever was behind me...a fat guy. Water was starting to fill in the room too...I climbed up to higher levels of the courtroom. Few people are following me and the T-Rex is swimming the the ever deepening water that's filling up the room. We get higher and higher in the balcony and then at one point I'm climbing up onto a rotting wooden banister left unkempt at the nosebleed heights. The water stops and somehow I get the Idea that I could do this forever. But then I remember...This T-rex is a reptile, which means it'll lay eggs, and those will come after me...This was a horrible realization.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

The sidewalk on the southwest side of the stretch of M. Road that heads southeast toward R. V. Road, which is on a downhill slope [both in this dream and in reality], has a banister running alongside it [only in this dream, as far as I know]. I'm sliding down the banister, and two large dogs come up to me to investigate. I manage to stop on the banister so that the woman who owns them can talk to me. She says that the oddness of what I was doing and my ethnicity had made the dogs curious. I say, “Really? I didn't think this was all that strange. I just took it for granted.” I feel the sensation of a dog's teeth gripping the back of my shirt, just behind my left shoulder, and pulling back on it, but I reassure myself by thinking, “It's all in your head.” Once again, I've only realized that I'm dreaming as I'm waking up from it.

I'm driving in the brown car with my mom to go and pick up our friend Sam K. from one of our old houses. He isn't there. When we turn around to head back, we decide to “go halvsies” - that is, we both sit in the back seat and reach forward as needed to turn the steering wheel. It's very easy to reach it. I remark, “Wow, I didn't expect this to work so well! I didn't expect it to work at all. I thought we would just crash and die.” I'm remembering having previously dreamed about driving this way [see my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10 – that's the dream I'm remembering], and am surprised that driving that way is working out so well in reality. [Ha!!] Our car goes all over lawns and sidewalks with us driving it this way, and we have one close call with another car, but we manage to avoid actually running into anything. I woke up and was very annoyed to realize that that had just been a dream, too, and that I hadn't noticed that it was one.

Awake, Non-lucid, Lucid, Half-awake, half-dream state, [Commentary made while awake]

While out of the house somewhere, I put on a navy-blue, stretchy headband [that I have in real life], and make some kind of wish. This causes me to suddenly have long hair again [I cut my real hair short at the beginning of this month]. My hair is down to my shoulder blades, which is still a little shorter than it was when I cut it, and seems thinner and wavier than it used to be when it was long. I don't want my mom to see me with my hair long again, because if she did, I would have to explain to her about the magical headband. So, when I return home, I do my best to avoid letting her see me.

I consider re-cutting my hair myself, but decide I don't want to, because it wouldn't come out very neat. I decide instead to go back and find the stretchy headband and make another wish to reverse the effects of the first one. I ask my mom if I can use the car to run an errand. She asks what it is, and I answer that I'm going to a vacant lot to look for something I lost. This is true, but it's not the whole truth.

I get into the brown car, and someone is in the front passenger seat. [My dad, I think.] I say to him, “Watch the street signs. I don't even know my own neighborhood in these dreams.” And they'll probably change, I think. I back the car out of the garage, turn it to my left, and continue backing in that direction all the way down to the corner, where the street turns 90 degrees. [In this dream, this corner is now a 90-degree turn like it is in reality, not a four-way intersection like it was in the first dream described in my dream journal entry dated 10/08/10.] Sure enough, as we drive down the street backwards and then back up the street going forward, each street sign says something different the second time we pass it than it did the first time we passed it. The street signs are all blue with white letters [not green with white letters, as they are in reality]. Eventually, I find the street I'm looking for and turn left onto it.

The next scene seems to take place in a fast-food restaurant. I find the headband I was looking for and restore my short haircut. [For this part of the dream, I was in “video-game-controller” mode again, as I described in my dream journal entry dated 10/21/10. I was kind of removed from the action and aware that it was all going on in my mind/imagination, and at the same time, I was fully aware of my real body.]

Woke up at 1:36 A.M., took some notes on my dream, went back to bed.

My parents and I are attending a wedding at the estate of some really rich people. The estate has a little re-creation of a neighborhood from old-timey New York, and the little church in that neighborhood is being used for the ceremony. In one room, an old man, the father or grandfather of the groom, I think, is lying on a hospital bed, all dressed up for the ceremony and being included in the festivities. After the ceremony, they make everyone attending the wedding pose for a group picture. My dad wants to put some sand in containers to use it to stabilize some photography equipment, so he gets out a bunch of sand toys, and I help him shovel sand into buckets. The people who own the estate are originally from Thailand, and they've recreated the beaches of Thailand on their estate. The sand we're shoveling is filled with beautiful blue-and-white seashells, colorful stones and jewels, and gold dust.

Woke up at 3:36 A.M., took some notes, went back to bed.

I'm at my old high school, walking across campus, looking for the classroom of one of my old teachers. I get to the western edge of campus, where the furthest-out portable classrooms used to be, and discover that there's a sort of ravine there, with concrete stairs leading down the near side and up the far side. On the far side of the ravine stand the furthest-out portables. I'm not really surprised that so much has changed in the years since I've been away.

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An aside:

When I cut my hair short in reality, it was after many years of having long hair. I've been wondering for a while whether or not my dream self (if I may steal some jargon from the Matrix universe, my residual self-image) would still have long hair. Not surprisingly, thinking about this over a period of time caused me to dream about it. I find it interesting, and reassuring, that after only three weeks of having short hair in reality, even my dream self apparently feels that that's the norm, and that having long hair feels wrong.

Also, I'm pleased with the increasing frequency of my lucid dreams, but disappointed with my lack of control. I keep realizing that I'm dreaming and either not trying to do or change anything at all, or trying and failing. I will continue trying to improve.

Hi
Type: Non-lucid, vivid, memorable
Lucidity: [1/10]
Vividness: [9/10]

A family reunion at a resort settled on the side of a gorgeous beach, rock faced cliff leading down to the beach, huge glass doors, the whole shibang. It's a beautiful sunny summer day, dark green foliage and healthy trees everywhere, white sand. All is well, children playing, until one of the Aunts of the family notice the youngest child of the family is missing, a little girl. The whole family searches around the house, no girl - spreads the search outside around the house toward the beach, everyone is calling for her. As more time passes without finding her, the girl's mother becomes more and more frantic and paranoid [as any mother would in the situation]. Since these huge rocks [like Red Rocks in Denver, except normal looking with green moss] are right behind the house, the mother is convinced she's fallen off and everyone heads down to the beach below and recruit the beach goers for a search party. A bell sounds in the distance and everybody gathers around - a man sees something in the near distance floating in to shore.

The scene skips to flashes of some pictures of the little girl laughing and playing with a guy in his early thirties probably, pretty normal looking, that somebody must have taken earlier that day, showing that she must have been abducted by this man and killed. The family finds the work-place of the guy since he is nowhere to be found, a video rental/convenience store, and go there late at night after they hold the girl's funeral on the side of the hill near the place she died.. The father of the girl walks behind the counter and register and holds him up against the wall by his throat, acusing him of what he did and getting angry, not shouting angry but more of a morbid/calm/sad anger instead of hysterics. The whole family files in behind him, takes pictures of this happening, and proceeds to walk around the store like tourists, beach clothes, big glasses and all, checking out the movies available and eating food off the shelves [evidently terrorizing the guy]. Some of them go outside to smoke periodically. They leave after a bit , silently staring at the clerk [stealing lots of stuff from the store as they go], push him over and say "This isn't over."

Focus switches to the clerk ,sitting on the ground behind the counter with a kind of confused, thoughts burning through his head - he never abducted any girl. He was spending his break on the beach, and happened to walk past a little girl with a sunhat and dress on. She looked up and smiled at him, and as if the rug was pulled out from under his feet, the world turns hellish - black stormy sky, the girl has become a nude red demon with distorted and malicious looking features, and the ocean has morphed into a swirling vortex of fire and lava. The demon grabs his leg and starts hauling at his leg, pulling him into the ocean of fire. He loses conciousness, and comes to his senses lying on the beach, alone. He looks into his lap, where the family threw the pictures of him playing with the girl happily, hauntedly.

After this I'm on the hill where the girl is buried, digging through her coffin, which is like a shell of a coffin around hers, so she's not lying there dead or anything. It's dark out, waning moon and lots of stars, it seems that the hill is near the backyard of the supposed abductor. I'm looking through this bag and I find a comic, which shows the entire dream I just had, and at the end it shows this place 2,000 years later, and the place where the girl pulled him into the fire, there is a swirling rock formation that resembles the vortex that had appeared. This adds to the creepiness of the whole thing, and I run down to the water to investigate. I'm wearing beach clothes, feel the cool sand under my feet. Incredibly clarity. Well, there's nothing there, just an ordinary beach, and I run back up to the coffin to fetch the comic book to show my friends, but when I look it is no longer there! I don't feel compelled to open the casket, nor fearful of it particularly, but close the coffin and start heading to my car. As I do my black cat Tori runs past me and meows, I chase and pet her a bit [ADHD LOL] then dash to my car to drive off quickly since I'm trespassing on this guy's property. I get in, foot on the break, try to quickly search for my keys where I usually stash them - find it! - fumble a bit and stick it into the ignition, lights on, turn the key and the car won't start and I wake up.


This reinforces, yet again, that driving a car is one of my most frequent dream activities, for whatever reason. I've been in a car in several dreams just in this past week. I've resolved to do an RC every single time I get into a car from now on . If I'm in a car and realized I haven't RC'd yet, then I missed the target but RC anways. This way I'll have it in my head "did I RC when I got in the car?", and if I didn't I might think to myself "Well how and when did I get in this car? Who is with me?" and might impel me to examine my situation more intently and BAM LUCIDITY.


well.. that's the plan at least.

[This started out as a regular dream, but it was after my alarm had gone off and I was only partially asleep and partially awake, so I think I was actively using my imagination to keep this sequence of events going, and it felt like I was doing so from outside it, as if my imagination were a video game controller. Hence the shift from teal and present tense, representing a regular dream, to green and past tense, which is what I use for those times when I'm not sure if what I experienced was a really low-quality lucid dream, or just me imagining stuff, or what.]

I'm in the brown car with P. We're both sitting in the back seat, but I'm still controlling the car. [I honestly don't know if I'm just reaching forward and grabbing the wheel every so often, or I'm just telekinetic.] I remember that we've driven this way in dreams before. I say to P., “Thanks again for the ride.” Apparently, she brought the car to pick me up from somewhere and take me home. We're driving up a major street in the area where we grew up.

At some point, we shifted from riding in the car to riding on bicycles. She was on a little pink bicycle that one or the other of us had when we were little. We continued our journey back toward the house on bicycles. I realized that on the route we were going, we would eventually get to a street named Amaranth, where I would get hit by a car and killed. I knew this because I remembered dreaming about it before. [Now that I'm fully awake and writing this, though, I don't remember dreaming about it before. More false memories, I think.] As we got closer to Amaranth Street, I felt a cold chill of fear of my impending death for a moment, but somewhere in the back of my mind, I was also aware that none of this was real. We reached the corner where we could turn to get onto Amaranth Street, or take a different route. I said, “Do you believe in fate? I don't.” P. decided to take the different route, the one that wouldn't take us onto Amaranth Street at all, and we continued riding.

(This dream was actually from two nights ago. I don't remember any dreams from last night.)

I was in the belltower of a building like a mission-style church, with adobe or stucco walls. I saw a crowd of people below. Some were milling around. Some may have been looking up at me. I told myself at some point that I was in Korea.

While in the tower, I may actually have been conversing (mentally? non-verbally?) with a man down on the ground. The man was shortish, mediun-build, slightly balding Korean man wearing eyeglasses, a pale polo shirt and pale jeans. The man may have been a family member of mine.

In the middle of our "conversation," I looked up to the sky and pointed. There was a sudden atmosphere of panic. Then a huge, white jet flew into our view.

The jet was so long, narrow, and white, that I at first thought it was a nuclear missle. It had two fin-like objects prtruding from its nose. But then, as the object sped over me, I could see that it was just an enormous, very thin, white jet with thin, squarish wings.

The jet made a lot of noise and then passed out of view of the church. I may have feared the jet was going to crash once it was out of view. I'm not sure whether the jet crashed.

I was now writing a review of this whole thing, as if writing about an air show for an online newspaper.

I was now a little girl. I was writing (actually, more like thinking out my article or "remembering" the article "I had written) about the man with whom I had been conversing as if he were the organizer of this show.

I was giving the man a bad review. In the middle of the review, however, the man stopped me. He was now my (the little girl's) father. He was white, tall, strong, with tan skin and blonde hair. He sat on steps (leading up to the bell?) and grabbed my arms gently.

He shook me a little and asked me to tell him why I had said those things about him. I don't know why I wasn't answering -- maybe I felt like being rude. He then started asking me about the big jet, and what kind of jet I thought it was.

I told him (it was now like I was looking out from the belltower or some balcony) that it wasn't a --, because I had actually seen stealth bombers flying over New York City on a number of occasions. I corrected myself, thought slowly, and said, "No. I mean Blackbirds."

I don't know whether the man/"my daddy(which is what I called him -- daddy)" believed me, but he took me to a big area full of jets. I figured that now I'd be able to point the Blackbird out to him.

We drove through what looked like a vast parking lot full of jets. The place seemed to be completely void of people. There might have been some huge structures around, the walls or building-top bridges of which occasionally shaded the parked jets.

We curved counter-clockwise into another aisle of parked jets. I saw a jet that looked a little like a Blackbird. So I pointed it out to the man as a Blackbird.

But it wasn't quite right. It looked too small. It looked plasticky. And it also looked flat, as if the jet had been flipped upside-down or had its top shaved off. It seemed to have three rectangular holes in it, too, like it was a jet-sized light switch.

We were driving down the parking lot. I may have seen more jets that almost looked like Blackbirds. The man and I were driving toward some area that seemed to have a small, rickety, metal staircase going up the side of it. I could feel the warmth of the sun.

Hello
I'm really back on track with the whole lucid thing Only problem which stays is that I wake up after realizing I'm dreaming.

Vividness: 4/5
Recall:4/5
Hours of sleep: 7.6h

I'm in an hotel. I'm on a some kind of holiday. It's already evening and I'm exhausted. I go to bed and try too sleep. But I can't. It's to hot insides I'm sweating. I finally get out of my bed and I decide to leave the hotel. I open the door and I'm outsides. It's sunrise. There is a bus and my car. I meet someone and he says to me, that I have to pick someone up in the city, where my university is and drive him somewhere to France.
I don't pay really attention. I'm in a bad mood. I just go in my car and drive away. While driving I'm wondering how I have to drive to get at the right place. I realize that it's impossible to go at this place so I drive to somewhere else.
In front of me are a few skyscrapers. They look really weird: They have terraces on the top and the buildings form a gigantic pyramid. Each roof-top is connected to another one and at the top of the highest building, there is a huge statue.
Suddenly I'm flying, but outside my car. I sit on a pillow. It flies higher and higher gets nearly to the highest building. I want to catch one of the hundreds stairs on a roof-top, but my pillow flies away without me.
I start to fall. I get a strange feeling. I feel that I'm lying on something, although there isn't anything. I realize that it's impossible for me to fly in real life and that it's unrealistic that I'm falling from the sky. I'm glad that I realize it, because I had begun to panic a bit because I'm falling from so high.
BUT everything gets directly dark and I awake
I have my eyes closed. I start to imagine to fly in a rocket and I'm saying in my head: "You gonna re-enter your dream and you will manage to stay lucid". I repeated it several times.
BUT something strange happens: I suddenly hear my brother's voice in my head. It says: "That isn't going to work!". I began arguing with this voice who came from my subconscious. I thought : Shut the f*ck up !"
I' m in a completely other place. I'm in a late night show. I don't realize that I'm dreaming and simply listen to the speaker. He's explaining how it's possible that people think that Michael Jackson is still alive.

The End.
Don't forget to KEEP IT UP!

10/17/10
My dreaming was pretty intense.

At one point I was in a bed. There's a female with me, a friend, I think. I cannot see. Then I am aware of several males around me. They are pinching me, hard. I do not like it. I squirm away. I know that the female friend has arranged this. I am betrayed. Somehow I can see again. I am angry. The friend says something like, "Come on, it's not like was going to let them rape you or something." I have the leg of a chair. I start whacking people in the head and neck. I succeed in hitting some of them and they all go away.

Not sure what quite happened next.

This may be a separate dream-- not sure -- but then I was with 2 friends, one in a wheel chair. We are trying to find a car. One large white sedan appears.. it has three seats across the front, plenty of room. But when we get in it later it only has 2 seats.

---
Commentary:
Something significant about the first part of the dream is that I fought people and actually landed blows, and perhaps even won the fight. Usually when I am fighting I can't land a punch or other blow, and I definitely lose the fight.

I also remember detail about the table leg I used-- it was similar to the legs of the small chairs from my mom's house. Tan color, with rounded ridges. Maybe 18 inches long.

There were 5 males and 1 female (the friend).

I didn't recognize any of them from my waking life. I don't remember much about what they looked like, actually.

16.10.2010

Tales From a Survivor (DILD)

★★★★☆

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

The undead are everywhere in this hell-forsaken, urban town. Myself, and three other survivors have managed to snag ourselves an old red Cadillac and are on our way to wherever we can find refuge. Of course, there's only one problem: the car is a stick, and none of us know how to work the damn thing. I volunteer to drive, since I understand the basic concept, and manage to get us moving after some work with the clutch. Unfortunately, I have no feel for shifting gears so every mistimed swerve around the frequent masses of rotting, staggering, corpses dotting our path slows us down considerably. And when you're surrounded by these monsters, the last thing you want to do is slow down.

______________

The four of us are in a dank sewer system, with another group of survivors, but the green, waist-deep, muk surrounding us is the least of our problems. Cornered, without a clearly defined means of escape, there's a school of zombie piranhas hot on our tail. It's like something out of a dream.

“This is your dream, after all. . .”

Says the small girl at my side as I become wholly aware of my situation. This is a dream all right, but I still want to get the hell out of here. Running out from under the large, boat-sized pipe above us, I jump up and pull down on the huge, mildew-covered cart that looks like it belongs on an ancient, over-sized amusement park ride. Motioning for everyone to climb their way out, I begin the journey myself. Halfway up, the cart buckles under our weight, sending me crashing down to the lower seats.

Great. Now I'm going to be savagely ripped apart and devoured by a bunch of undead fish!

It isn't pleasant.

______________

“What are you doing?”

“Making macaroni pictures for the dead.”

“Right,” I state, ignoring the clearly-oblivious, craft-obsessed people in the room. The whole scene is quite absurd really. Sure, this might be the last haven on Earth, but is this really the best my mind can up with after that whole tunnel fiasco? The computers in the corner of this modern, windowed atrium-turned-art-room catch my eye. Once there, I find a worn, yellowed note tucked under one of the keyboards.

“Arts and Crafts
1600 hours
We'll be there.”

Clearly, this is an extraction notice, meaning this area isn't going to be safe for much longer. I guess this explains the whole arts and crafts thing, then. I toss the note aside, and approach the tall double doors at the front of the room.

That's when the nightmare begins.

A demented, ethereal voice hisses through the room as the florescent lights around me dim and flicker menacingly. The voice continues its bone chilling speech, piercing not only my ears, but my mind. They're here.

Stepping away from the door, I locate my group, who're already moving back into the building, away from this madness. As I run to catch up, the tall glass window to my right shatters suddenly, and the stuff of nightmares, the source of the voice, falls through, blocking my path. It's all skin and sinew, with matted black hair on its misplaced, feminine head. Its arms and legs, if you can even call them that, are unnaturally long and bent at disturbing angles. To my relief, it doesn't seem to notice me, and moves sickeningly away, towards the screaming, as more glass shatters around the room, spilling forth the beast's tentacle-mouthed minions. I walk past it, but make the mistake of giving it one last glance.

Before I know it, it's on top of me, trying to splay my body into bits. Sighing internally, I grab the snarling head, and twist its neck, hard, fast. I'm met with resistance, but it's not enough to save the wretch.

______________

Turns out the escort was real, and here we are now, riding a Scorpion Tank through a literal sea of undead. I'm designated driver, once again, and sure enough: Tank. Beats. Everything. For fun, I blast holes in the ocean of bodies, sending bits of flesh flying into the cold, red, night air. The zombies fill out their ranks faster than I can take them out, but it doesn't matter to me. I'm driving a fucking tank during the zombie apocalypse for crying out loud. It doesn't get much better than that.

Awake, Non-lucid, [Commentary made while awake]

[I remember three dreams from last night, the last one REALLY long and complicated. It wasn't lucid, unfortunately, but it was still pretty awesome.]

[Fragment] I'm at a mall. Even though it's late at night, there are still people approaching the entrances, mostly to get to the McDonald's and the Starbucks that are near one of the entrances.

[Somewhat longer dream] I'm at Disneyland, going on Star Tours. There's a really, really long, elaborate queue for it, but I just walk straight through, because there are hardly any people waiting for it. The first part of the ride is a standard spinner, which is up on a platform with a big painting of Buzz Lightyear and his spaceship on it. “Why would they do that?” I think when I see it. [Sigh. I really need to make serious reality-checking a stronger habit.] After we (the guests) get off the spinner, we walk back across the platform to the entrance to the next part of the queue, where we are handed a seatbelt to take with us when we go and board our actual Starspeeder, which has four rows of four seats each. I try to get into the seat furthest to the right in either the second or third row, but I can't; it's too narrow for me. There's another empty seat in one of the rows behind me, but everyone else has already sat down, so to get there, I have to climb over everyone else. I accidentally kick one person in the head and just miss another in the process.

[Really long dream begins here] I see what look like full-page panels from a comic book: each one is a cityscape at night, and there is a glow of sunlight on the horizon. The point of view moves, moving toward the horizon each time, but every time it passes over the horizon and 'turns the page,' there's still the same distant glow of light on the new horizon.

After the fourth or fifth repetition of this, the scene transforms into three-dimensional live-action all around me. I'm still me, but I know that I'm imagining myself into the universe of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which is what this place is. I'm in a room, and there are two other people there with me, a man with dark-brown hair and stubble and a blonde woman. They're both supporting characters from the show. [I knew what these characters' names were in the dream, but I cannot remember them now, so I will refer to them as “The Guy” and “The Girl.”]

Outside, it's now daytime, but there's a thick white haze covering the entire sky. This has been going on for several days, and it will allow vampires to be out and about during the day.

The Guy, The Girl, and I all go to a class at a school. I'm not playing the role of any particular character from the show; I'm just trying to blend in as a generic student. We enter a classroom, and all the students hand their homework in to the teacher before sitting down. I try to walk straight to one of the old-fashioned, dark wood desks and sit down, but the teacher grabs my arm and asks me, “Did you do your homework?” I say, “No, I don't have it.” Of course I haven't done it; I'm not actually a resident of this fictional universe. Then it occurs to me to try reaching into my backpack, which is sitting on a chair, and expecting my homework to be there in order to obtain it. I try it, but it doesn't work. [Yes, that's right. In this dream, I remembered to apply a technique I learned here on DV, even though I hadn't realized that I was dreaming. My mind is weird.]

Later, The Guy, The Girl and I are all in a car. We're talking about how I'm going to leave soon (or something is going to happen soon), but it's all right, because afterward, The Girl is going to be just the same. “In fact, she'll be whatever you want,” I say to The Guy. I'm the only one who knows that the role of The Girl is actually being played by Bebe, a fictional character I imagined up years ago [both in this dream and in my waking life, by the way], and when I stop imagining myself into the Buffyverse and leave it, Bebe will leave it, too, because she's part of my imagination.

I look out the window of the car and see, in the distance on the top of a hill, the silhouette of a big roller coaster and Ferris wheel. I think, “That must be Six Flags Magic Mountain.”

The Guy, who is driving the car, says something along the lines of, “Are those guys still following us?” We look into the rearview mirror and see four guys walking behind our car. Our car is driving pretty slowly, because we're on a narrow street with lots of other cars on it that runs through town, but still, if those guys managed to follow our car on foot all this way and through all this traffic, they must be ghosts. The Guy shoots a fireball at one of them, but he dodges it, even calling his attack (“Ghost Dodge!”). There is a fight out on the street, and The Guy, The Girl, and I all get killed by the ghosts.

Having been killed, I wake up in some unidentified location. [Not really! I was still dreaming, but as usual with FAs, I didn't realize it was false until after I woke up for real.] Waking up upon being killed is exactly what I expected to happen. I know that that particular dream/imaginary place isn't supposed to exist anymore – I was the only one dreaming/imagining it and I just got thrown out of it by being killed, so it should have just collapsed – but I think, “Screw the rules, I have imagination,” and imagine my way right back into it. [Note that although the rules being screwed here are the ones from Inception, there was no sign of one of their dream-sharing devices during this FA – everything was powered entirely by my imagination.]

I'm back in the Buffyverse, but not in the same place I just left; I'm walking around in an unpaved plaza. Passing by a particular cafe, I find my Starbucks travel mug [yes, the one I have in real life] standing on the ground outside the shop, being used to collect the water dripping off the roof. The lid is lying next to it, and both the lid and the cup are all cracked and broken from being left outside for such a long time. I say something along the lines of, “Did I leave this thing out here for the last few days?” to the cafe owner. Then I pick up the cup and the lid, take them with me, and continue walking. I find several small, brick structures with audio-animatronic characters in them, activated by motion sensors. These structures are actually trash cans; I use one of them to throw away the broken cup.

The next thing I remember is being in my old townhouse apartment in Florida. I discover that the two sheets of notebook paper I set down on the couch a few minutes ago, the ones with notes from my dreams written on them, are soaking up liquid. I pick them up and see that there's punch spilled on the couch. Annoyed, I say, “I have to read these.” My roommate, Laya, is there, and the following conversation ensues.

Laya: Someone threw a cup of punch at the couch.
Me: We don't have any paper towels in the house, do we?
Laya: No.

So I go over to the kitchen sink and get a cloth towel.

Laya: You should pull your weight around here.

I start trying to wipe the spilled punch off the couch. It's a foldout couch, and I've been sleeping on it. An unidentified male friend of ours is looking around upstairs and sees that none of the bedrooms up there are being used. I'm alerted to this fact when he calls down the stairs to us.

Unidentified Male Friend: (Emiko) never sleeps here. [he used my real first name in the dream]
Me (yelling back): Yes, I do! In fact, this is the only place I've slept at all since we've been in Florida this go-round! It's just that I sleep downstairs!

When I woke up for real, I commented, “The kitchen sink isn't up against the back wall, and since when do any of those apartments have foldout couches?” [Also, “this go-round?” Apparently, in this dream, not only had I gone back to spend another year there, but so had several of my friends from that year. Finally, my memory for spoken dialog from dreams has been really bad up until now, but this time it was really good. That's pretty cool.]